Clifford Anderson

Mashups are the best place to start, in order to get your feet wet, before you move on to full on remixes.

If you don’t already own it, you will want to purchase Mixed in Key (Warning: They have always-online DRM – I don’t like recommending them, but they really are that much better than the rest). If you don’t already own a DAW, you may also want to consider picking up a copy of Mashup from the same company… it’s basic, but it’s a cheap ticket into the party.

Run tracks through Mixed in Key – not the tracks you DJ with, but the “regular” music you are interested in trying to Mashup (For example, the Bee-Gees and, say, Pink Floyd, a’la Wax Audio). You are looking for tracks that have the same key, those are compatible for a mashup.

Then, load the tracks up into your DAW, and start to slice the tracks up. I personally like to break them up by their function, e.g. Intro, Verse, Chorus, Bridge, etc. (This is also how my self-made DJ software operates, I like to do live mashups.)

From there, start putting parts together that sound good between the two tracks. You’ll most likely be spending most of your time fitting vocals from one track with instrumental bits from the other, since vocals clash in a mashup just like they do when DJing. Slap an EQ on the tracks, a 3 band should do fine, and use that to shape how much of each song you are mixing in at any given time.

You can certainly also make a track mostly from scratch using acapellas you’ve picked up, or you can try to isolate the vocals yourself.

If you are going to isolate them yourself, depending on the method you use, your results WILL vary. If you can find the instrumental version of the same track, that will give you the best results. There are several videos on YouTube that treat vocal isolation in depth, spend some time getting good at it.

That said, I find that if your remix gets busy, your listeners aren’t going to be noticing how imperfect your vocal rip is. This will vary from genre to genre – I do Ghetto Funk remixes, and honestly, sometimes I just cut the bass and that’s all I bother with, but that won’t work for all styles.

This was a disjointed post, but I hope it at least gives you some rough idea what to be looking for.

hahahahah. Dad don’t love ya THAT much… heheheheheheh

It will depend on your sticks, as they affect the transfer rate as well. I would venture to guess that your old stick will probably be a limiting factor, assuming it was approximately the age of your old Mac. Maybe not, but, usually never know since most sticks don’t have that much information printed on ’em.

Awesome, grats!

I would like to throw my support behind Chuck’s suggestion of getting a used beginning controller first. When I started, I followed a similar route (though mine wasn’t used, but was still very low cost) – I was still playing out on a weekly basis, including a few decent sized shows (150 or so people), so it was enough to be able to properly perform, but I avoided jumping into things before I really understood what MY needs were (and, as it turns out, what I thought my needs were in the beginning didn’t match up to my actual needs at ALL).

As for the Numark CDJ clones, I really don’t think you’re going to be able to prepare yourself as well for eventually working on a controller with those.

Seems like a used Mixtrack Pro 2 would be a great choice for you – it’s a Serato controller that comes with Intro (which has some limitations, but not game-stoppers on day one). This would mean that, at least for right now, you’d be in a position to try Serato, and you could probably pick up a used copy of Traktor for about 35-40 euro (you see it float through the For Sale forum over at DJ Tech Tools for that price on a pretty regular basis) so that you could be well informed as to what you might want for your software before you go spending a lot of money on your primary controller. In the long run, it won’t be the best choice for a Traktor controller (Native Instrument tending toward preferring to support their own hardware increasing to maximum over time), but it is more than sufficient to learn both Traktor and Serato right now to help you make an informed choice.

Hi, Paul, welcome!

I can’t say I have ever experienced cue pitch being different than output pitch – this sounds like something that might require talking to the folks on the NI forum to get better technical support than we can offer. I may be wrong, someone may chime in with your answer, but I would still make sure to touch base over there (if you haven’t already) rather than waiting for an answer here.